I just completed my first image in 12 months! Data gathering ended up being a bit of a nightmare! Over 4 nights I only gathered 11 hours of data. I had equipment issues
every night - mostly self inflicted.
Firstly, I experimented with the baffle OS gave me in 2014 (to prevent stray light ingress) after painting it ultra black ("Musou Black"). This failed with ringed star halos around bright stars - no clue why
- so I had to remove it. Then I experimented with mount only guiding (as opposed to AO guiding). This failed because I forgot how to set up mount only guiding
- so I went back to AO guiding. Those two things wasted hours of possible imaging time over 2 nights. The next night my dome decided to stop working only a couple of hours into imaging
- killing the remainder of the session. Fixed the following day. And the coup de gras, while shutting down on the last night ( ie. parking the mount and de-rotating the imaging train), a cable wrapped around my imaging train very tightly, caught the HDMI cable powering the filter wheel and guide camera (SBIG FW8G), and snapped the plug off the cable.
Thankfully I had gathered as much data as I needed (just).
The good news was
the seeing was great! The best period yielded
1.48 arcsec FWHM (the best I've EVER seen) with an average over all subs of 2.1 arcsec FWHM. RMS guiding errors were of course tiny; around 0.18 arcsec on each axis.
Anyway, here is the result. IC 2599 / NGC 3324 (Gabriella Mistral) and NGC 3293 (Gem cluster). My FOV was only juuuust large enough to catch them both but the composition is reasonably well balanced IMO.
NGC 3324 is an open cluster in the constellation Carina, located northwest of the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) at a distance of 9,100 ly (2,800 pc) from Earth. It is closely associated with the emission nebula IC 2599, also known as Gum 31. The two are often confused as a single object, and together have been nicknamed the "Gabriela Mistral Nebula"
NGC 3293 (aka the Gem Cluster) is an open cluster also in Carina. It consists of more than 100 stars brighter than 14th magnitude in a 10 arc minute field, the brightest of which are blue supergiants of apparent magnitude 6.5 and 6.7. There is also a 7th magnitude pulsating red supergiant, V361 Carinae. It is associated with the open cluster NGC 3324. Both are fairly young, at around 12 million years old.
This is an (LHa)(RHa)G(BHa) image (L & Ha: 180 Mins & 120 mins respectievly). R,G & B were all 120 mins for a total integration time of 11 hours
To zoom and pan arount the full res / full frame:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/marc4d...etaken-public/
To see the full res crop of Gabbie:
https://pbase.com/gailmarc/image/173645782/original